Corporate marketing departments and marketing agencies struggle to recruit and retain qualified professionals for career paths that didn’t exist three years ago. In addition, agencies have failed to meet growing demand for integrated services, and to connect their services to measurable outcomes.

As a result, it’s become increasingly difficult for marketers to devise and execute integrated marketing strategies; select the right marketing agency partners; allocate time, money and talent; and adapt resources and priorities based on real-time performance.

In Search of a Better Way

At PR 20/20, we’ve experienced these challenges first hand, and we'vebecome motivated to find more efficient solutions that increase agency productivity and profitability, while creating greater value for clients.

A successful client-agency relationship starts early in the sales cycle with the discovery process. While we’ve used an online survey tool for more than six years to audit prospective clients, there are inherent flaws in the process:

It’s time intensive to turn responses into actionable intelligence.

High-level personnel are required to analyze responses, and therefore it’s not scalable.

The process by which survey inputs are turned into recommendations, including services and pricing, is not transparent to clients.

We believe there’s a better way. Our goal is to develop a platform that dramatically improves processes—business development, budgeting, strategy creation and campaign management—and has wide appeal and value to agencies, business owners and marketers.

This is the first step.

Introducing Marketing Score

PR 20/20's Marketing Score is a free online tool that assesses the strength of your business and marketing foundations, forecasts potential and aligns expectations.

It’s a subjective analysis from the viewpoint of internal stakeholders, including sales/marketing management and company executives. It’s also a marketing intelligence engine that recommends actions to improve your performance.

Marketing Score is based on the principle that every element of an organization, as it relates to marketing, can be divided into one of three categories: assets, neutrals and escalators.

By evaluating and scoring these elements, organizations can devise integrated marketing strategies; select the right marketing agency partners; allocate time, money and talent; and adapt resources and priorities based on performance.

The platform scores more than 130 factors in 10 sections, and takes approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. The ratings are then used to generate automated recommendations, which will become more intelligent and in-depth over time.

Example Rules-Based Recommendation:

Factor 1: High-growth company

Factor 2: More than 50 employees

Factor 3: Very weak (1) internal communications

Factor 4: No internal social network

Recommendation: Break down communications silos, reduce email clutter and improve internal communications. Consider integration of Yammer, an enterprise social network designed to build social-savvy businesses that are more collaborative, efficient and productive.

While the beta tool focuses on assessments and recommendations, the product roadmap includes more robust solutions that will solve much larger marketing challenges. For example:

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Paul Roetzer

Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer) is founder and CEO of PR 20/20, author of The Marketing Performance Blueprint and The Marketing Agency Blueprint, and creator of The Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute and Marketing Score. Full bio.